Women’s Freedom Has Always Been Suppressed by Misogyny and It’s Far from Over

We must confront our truth before we are freed.

In one of the Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Jennifer Lawrence And Viola Davis opened up on how challenging it was to be a Women Action Star. These two women shared their doubts that they never believed they could get a role in action movies because of their gender.

“We were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,” Lawrence said.

When Davis was approached to play the lead role in “ The Woman’s King,” she said, “That’s not going to happen, because you don’t see it.” “What studio is going to put money behind it? How are they going to be convinced that Black women can lead a global box office?” Davis said.

Women have always been subjected to inferior roles in Hollywood so it was no surprise that our two biggest stars in Hollywood questioned their gender when given the opportunity to bring their skills to the table.

If “we are who we choose to be,” why do we allow misogyny to hold us back?

It was Carl Gustav Jung who pinned “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become,” to express his confidence in being the master of his destiny.

Carl Gustav was a psychologist and the founder of analytic psychology, a theory of mind that describes the importance of personal unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness in solving personal problems.

Gustav’s study revealed that our unconscious mind is a collection of our personal experiences and of our ancestral experiences, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures.

According to Jung, we carry the memories of our ancestors in our subconscious. We use this collective unconscious to assign structure and meaning to the world.

The purpose of analytical psychology is to emphasize the significance of the present; how cultural shifts and archetypes play a role in our individual experiences.

Gustav believed that the collective unconscious which manifests in different archetypes guides us to self-fulfillment, and thus each person should strive to bring their individual self into harmony with it.

In simple words, to find a solution to our present problems we must understand good and bad, from ages past and present.

Because human behavior is influenced by repressive human emotions, we become conscious of how society sees us. This is why we seek validation. This is also why we are in an infinite battle to prove ourselves.

When we reject our collective subconscious, we constantly question who we are, what we want and why we should matter. The struggle with self-identity makes us question our values and self-worth.

If you are tired of subjugation against women and waiting for a change, buckle up because we will be down this train for much longer.

Yes, the struggle for freedom is far from over. How can we escape misogynism when we allow internalized misogyny, bigotry and female misogyny to hinder all efforts to women’s freedom?

Like their male counterparts, female misogynists are driven by either unjustified hate or contempt for women.

For the past 100 years, some women have succeeded in pushing back against the sexist world they inherited, but lately, social and religious gender roles have threatened the progress made toward gender equality.

Hence, the reason misogyny is still a threat to modern women is that we are perpetuating the old patriarchal ideology. Maybe women don’t have the muscle to fight for their freedom after all.

People like Matt Forney thinks “women are empty vessels, a void with no identity of their own. Without a man to fill us with his essence, we are as useless as a crabapple rotting on the sidewalk.”

Forney couldn’t be further from the truth. When a woman gets married, she throws her father’s name down the bin and adopts her husband’s as if her maiden name was never a part of her identity.

The other day, I had an unpleasant conversation with my younger sister. She was against the school authority for marking ashes on her children’s foreheads during Ash Wednesday. When she got married, she denounced her Catholic membership and joined her husband’s church, an Apostolic.

This is religious bigotry at its core. My annoyance was that she acted as if the Ash Wednesday ritual was a devilish crime just because her husband is against it. As someone who grew up a Catholic, I expected her to make her husband understand that such a ritual was harmless instead of going ballistic about it.

Directly or indirectly we reinforce misogyny and sexism in our daily lives. Male supremacists think so little of women and we play into their description of us.

One men’s rights activist Andrew Anglin has publicly expressed his hatred for women (and I mean all women) on his blog a number of times. His statement that “women crave men who call them stupid and claim they shouldn’t have any rights. They also crave being tied up, beaten and raped,” should strike a nerve in all women, especially female misogynists. Yet we have women who defend toxic masculine men like Anglin.

Sadly, no matter how many times the Alt-right and incels degrade women, some women remain in support of prejudices against them.

Some women are so attached to traditional gender roles that any deviation by other women threatens their identity. It makes them hate women who are different. These women don’t know their place, except for what they are told by men.

Then there are also women who are so full of self-loathing that they unknowingly hold themselves in contempt but that contempt spills out in a loathing of other women.

Alt-right women want women to focus on their “natural” duties of childbearing and supporting their husbands.

Like their male counterparts, they believe that “as long as white women are having children, being dutiful housekeepers and making sure their husbands are happy, they can be easily influenced” to support white supremacist ideologies.

And here we are shaming childless women for choosing to stand against patriarchal social constructs. Single-by-choice women remain targets of sexist attacks for not following a script played out for them.

Thanks to women who completely depend on their husband’s finances, the struggle for equity and women’s freedom takes two steps backward. I see some confused women parading the feminist tag, yet, they think their life is incomplete without a man or a child.

As long as we have internalized patriarchal ideologies, women will remain subjugated for a long time.

Extremist and misogynist descriptions of women are derogatory enough, we don’t need to ascribe to their construct.

If we believe “we are who we choose to be” then we should stop playing the roles patriarchy has led out for us. We should own our success as well as our failures and fears and stop blaming patriarchy for everything that happens to us.

If we can’t keep on blaming past events for our actions, then we shouldn’t adopt past ideologies that are against our fundamental human rights.

We have to take ownership of our life and be the person we want to be even if it’s against acceptable socio-cultural norms and patriarchal values.

But most importantly, women need to stand together in support of each other and work to bring about a change in society. We can achieve a lot if we simply choose to support each other and stand together as a sisterhood.

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